Remember the really cool Farecast app that would tell you whether prices for airline tickets go up or down? We featured them back in 2011, after they had been bought in 2008 by Microsoft for $115M. Then, the story from CEO Etzioni was:
So I’m very pleased that Farecast was picked up by Microsoft, was enhanced to become Bing Travel, and is now widely available and broadly used.
I was just tipped to this story from April: Farewell, Farecast: Microsoft kills airfare price predictor, to the dismay of its creator. Not surprisingly, the attitude post-exit of what happened to Etzioni’s idea isn’t quite as bright:
So, we end up with Bing travel as a thin veneer that redirects users to Kayak, while Google innovates with Google.com/flights, which I now use all the time. Google 1, Bing 0.
Getting access to all that money, all those resources, is always the glitter story that surrounds acquisitions. The drab reality is often a lot like the hangover you had after celebrating the check clearing.
Travis
on 04 Sep 14@DHH
For just as many “bad” acquisitions there’s just as many “great” acquisitions.
I’ll just take acquisitions from Google alone to highlight this point. I think there is no argument to be made in that the following Google acquisitions haven’t been great and transformative.
- Where 2 > Google Maps
- Sprinks > AdSense & AdWords
- Android > Android
- 2Web > Google Spreadsheet
- Postini ==> Gmail Spam Prevention
Georgie
on 10 Sep 14Farewell, Farecast – to the dismay of its creator. Maybe I’m being silly, but he got paid $115M for the program, I understand he’s upset that his creation, his baby, has been ‘killed’, but on the other hand, he sold it; it’s not his anymore. So why should he care?
Didn’t know Farecast turned into Bing Travel though. Never used it. Here in Holland anyway we use different ways for booking flights. Then you also don’t have to worry about the process of a “factuur maken” as we call it.
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